A steady force
In praise of the great Gene Hackman
28 Feb 2025 - The Washington Post
BY TY BURR
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
Most people have a favorite Gene Hackman performance. I have two. The actor, a chameleonic everyman with a movie star’s charisma, was found dead Wednesday with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and their dog in their New Mexico home. (An investigation into their deaths is ongoing.) Hackman was 95 and had stopped acting after playing a fictional former president in the 2004 satirical political film “Welcome to Mooseport.” He had a long and well-deserved retirement, and by all accounts a happy one.
He also had the love and admiration of audiences who felt that one of their own had somehow clambered up there on the screen, with a face like a beer mug and an unassuming sense of his own Hackman, in a famous robbery scene, leap over a bank counter while very much looking like a bank teller himself. As the gang (led by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s title characters) confidently exits, Hackman pulls down an elderly guard’s shades and says, with that signature glint: “Take a good look, pop. I’m Buck Barrow.” In her New Yorker review, Pauline Kael called it a “beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film.” He was 37 — and just getting started.
— Jonathan Fischer
‘ The French Connection’ (1971)
A man walks into a bar. Specifically, the hothead New York police detective “Popeye” Doyle walks into the Copa to meet another cop for a drink. In a few small, silent gestures, Hackman shows us so much about this character. He is an extrovert who loves the nightlife — his face lighting up as he strolls through the lively room, finger-guns with the bartender, bobs his head to the music, greets a woman with a kiss on the lips. Then, he clocks a small-time mobster across the room, and the ease drains from his face, as the actor plays a cop who is himself an actor — trying to act natural, trying to look like he is having fun, while stealthily keeping his target in his sights. Hackman was a profoundly ordinary-looking man, but the charisma that made him a star lived in those alert eyes, forever casing whatever joint he happened to be in.
— Amy Argetsinger
‘ The Conversation’ (1974)
As a Hoosier, it’s “Hoosiers.” As a paranoid, it’s “The Conversation.” I watched this movie my first night living away from home, very alone and hyperaware of strangers’ talk through dorm walls. Crucial stretches of the film depend on millimeter twitches of Hackman’s eyebrows and lips as he listens to tape. He stumbles over words and doesn’t finish sentences. Long after the movie’s plot has dissolved into a series of vibes, you’ll remember its final image: Hackman playing saxophone in a room whose every inch he has carefully, then madly, dismantled in a bug hunt — an avatar for anyone who’s tried to stay sane in a forest of Bluetooth beacons, spyware and maybe-maybe-not eavesdropping smartphones.
— Steven Johnson
‘Young Frankenstein’ (1974)
Under the beard, yes, that’s Hackman as the blind befriender of the Monster in “Young Frankenstein” — and in classic Mel Brooks form, not at all a politically correct role. But it’s proof that Hackman, known for gruff, dramatic roles, had a funny bone and could deliver a memorable cameo.
— Nora Simon
Superman movies (19781987)
Hackman is adored by comic book movie fans for his bombastic performance as Lex Luthor, bringing a goofy, insouciant energy even when the scripts were wonky and uneven, and making Superman’s greatest foe as endearing as he was cunning. Fun aside: The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 chronicled how Hackman and director Richard Donner debated whether the (bald and clean-shaven, in the comics) Luthor should have facial hair. They made a deal: If Hackman got rid of his mustache he grew for the role, Donner would do the same with his own. “True to his word, he celebrated my last razor stroke by gleefully pulling off the fake whiskers he’d acquired for the occasion,” Hackman said, adding, “Dick made it fun, and that’s why the films turned out that way, too.”
— Herb Scribner
‘Hoosiers’ (1986)
The pleasure is in watching Hackman’s new basketball coach in a small Indiana town ignore his critics and concentrate on parsing out pitch-perfect teaching moments. Like the way he leaves four men on the court after calmly telling a player to “sit down” for not passing four times before shooting, or tentatively but firmly pushes Dennis Hopper’s alcoholic to clean himself up and sit by his side as an assistant coach. He’s like a bizarro version of Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” a sheep in wolf ’s clothing whose grumpy benevolence shows the townspeople a new way to care about each other.
— Zachary Pincus-roth
‘Mississippi Burning’ (1988)
Hackman plays the more seasoned of two FBI agents (opposite the much younger Willem Dafoe) investigating the disappearances of civil rights rights activists in the Jim Crow South. It’s classic Hackman — a gruff character with a soft inside. He’s steely when dealing with local law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan, and tender with Frances Mcdormand, the wife of a rotten deputy sheriff. Hackman’s commanding way of matching his words with actions, no matter how brutal, makes him more than the clichéd bad cop who doesn’t play by the rules.
— Omari Daniels
‘Unforgiven’ (1992)
In Clint Eastwood’s revisionist western, the filmmaker stars as William Munny, a man of extreme violence desperately hoping to leave that life behind. His opposite number is Gene Hackman’s “Little Bill,” a sheriff with no such desire. Hackman’s performance is spellbinding, with the actor smoothly shifting between terrifying physicality, affable storytelling and thundering confidence. Little Bill greets an outlaw with a savage beating, regales and toys with a visiting writer, and wields his power over others through fear, cruelty and bloodshed. By the movie’s climax, with Munny and Little Bill face to face, Hackman’s sheriff bitterly recognizes and gives voice to what Munny had fought against: that both men are destined for the same bleak fate. Eastwood later marveled that Hackman “had the character so perfect right out of the box on every shot, every sequence.” Hackman won his second Oscar for the performance, more than two decades after winning his first for “The French Connection.”
— Mark Berman
‘ The Firm’ (1993)
Two things always get me to watch cable TV staple “The Firm”: the tinkle-tinkle bang-bang-bang piano score, and Hackman having a great time as Avery Tolar, a devilish senior partner at a murderous law firm. Tolar takes a young Mitch Mcdeere (Tom Cruise) under his wing while shamelessly hitting on his wife, but by the final scenes the devil turns out to be pretty decent, in a turn that only Hackman could make believable.
— Jenny Rogers
‘ The Birdcage’ (1996)
It would have been easy for Hackman to wither in the shadow of other performances in “The Birdcage.” Who could possibly compete with Robin Williams voguing across a drag club stage or Nathan Lane at his most adorably histrionic? But even playing the straight man — Sen. Keeley, the conservative self-appointed chief of the morality police — Hackman is a constant source of comedy. Watching his character fall a little bit in love with his daughter’s future “mother”-inlaw (Lane) is almost as delightful as the movie’s pièce de résistance: Attempting to ghost the paparazzi, he dons a cloud of white hair, false eyelashes and a plunging neckline while awkwardly shimmying to “We Are Family.”
‘ The Royal Tenenbaums’ (2001)
It was the movie that introduced the Wes Anderson aesthetic to the mainstream, and the movie that showed off Hackman’s ability to deliver a line, ride a go-kart and wear a doublebreasted suit with wild originality. As the family patriarch in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Hackman’s character loomed large in the story, and like Margot Tenenbaum’s bob and fur coat, still looms in our imagination. As ever, no one turned in a quirky line reading like Hackman. “Hell of a damn grave,” he says at one point. “Wish it were mine.”
***
Everyman actor’s roles defined cinema for decades
28 Feb 2025 - The Washington Post
WASHINGTON POST STAFF
Gene Hackman, who has died at 95, was a stunner in great movies and the best thing in many bad ones — a rumpled, roiling, always complex and often combustible presence who helped define the New Hollywood of the late ’60s and ’ 70s before going on to a varied and generous career. The writers and editors of The Washington Post picked some of their favorite Hackman performances.
‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967)
“Bonnie and Clyde” landed as a new kind of violent, of-the-moment but mythically immortal American movie, but with Hackman’s supporting role it more quietly announced the emergence of a new kind of American star: the everyman actor. Watch self-worth. When Hackman was a struggling actor in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was close friends with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, none of them considered leading men at the time, and certainly not the stuff of which movie stars are made. Yet the times they were a-changing, as someone sang then, and the old gods were falling out of fashion. Audiences, young audiences especially, craved faces and voices that looked like them, talked like them, had doubts and flaws like them.
Hoffman was the first of the new lumpen-stars to break through in “The Graduate” (1967), but Hackman was close behind, with an Oscar nomination for his supporting part as Clyde Barrow’s dimwitted brother Buck in the same year’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” With 1971’s “The French Connection,” he became an above-the-title, bestactor-winning star. His role as the crass, rule-breaking New York police detective “Popeye” Doyle was as far from Hackman’s own gently fastidious personality as can be imagined — which makes the performance, brutal and convincing, that much more remarkable.
From then on, Gene Hackman was Mr. Reliable — no matter whether a particular movie was good (“Night Moves,” 1975) or bad (“Lucky Lady,” also 1975), his presence in it demanded your loyalty and the price of a ticket. He worked hard and often, and if his portrayal of Lex Luthor in three Superman films was proof of a gift for comic villainy, Hackman’s 1992 Academy Award for best supporting actor as Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” was a reminder that his avuncular smile could serve as a mask for pure evil.
Of the many coulda-shoulda-woulda Hackman Oscar nominations that weren’t, I would direct you to a matched pair: “The Conversation” in 1974 and “Hoosiers” in 1986. In neither film does he play a hero or a villain. In both he is an average schmo whose personal values and mettle are tested. In “Hoosiers” he wins, and in “The Conversation” he loses, but it’s the essence of the Hackman persona that “winning” and “losing” are false binaries, not adequate to the task of illuminating the lives we lead and the choices we are often forced to make. It’s a muddle. Few were better at shining a light into the muddle than this actor.
In “The Conversation,” the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece that came between the first two “Godfather” movies, he plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert as withdrawn from human society as his last name implies. He keeps his professional secrets to himself and his emotions far from his occasional girlfriend (a young Teri Garr), but the possibility that the young couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) he has been hired to eavesdrop on may be targeted for murder brings the snail out of his shell, still bruised from a death his inaction caused years before. Things do not turn out as Harry hopes, and “The Conversation” broods with a pessimism and a paranoia that were very much of their era, White House tapes and all. They seem increasingly relevant once more as truth gets lost amid official false narratives, and as the deals that affect us get done where the cameras and microphones can’t quite catch what’s being said.
How do you play an invisible man, a human smudge? Harry’s officious little mustache, his glasses and his headphones serve as walls to keep others at bay, but the actor does something more — he illustrates the impossibility of hiding from oneself in the glimmers of personality that this walking ghost can’t help but leak and in the conscience he pretends not to have. “The Conversation” is a movie about the futility of trying to change the world for the better and also the necessity of it, if you ever want to have a soul. As I said, it’s a movie for our times.
“Hoosiers,” directed by David Anspaugh, is about trying to change a high school basketball team for the better and, in the process, its players, their families, a small town in Indiana and maybe everything else. That this is not an easy task is embodied in the film’s lead character, Norman Dale, the team’s new coach and a man as normal as his name, which is to say he has fallen down more than once and knows that life is the business of standing up again and again, as many times as it takes.
To me, this is the role that captures the essence of Gene Hackman, as an actor and possibly a person: a shy kid from Danville, Illinois, with a bully of a father who abandoned his family one day when the young Gene was 13, waving goodbye as his son was playing in the street. (“It was so precise,” Hackman told Vanity Fair in 2013. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor. I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child — if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”)
There are stories of how he was one of the nicest movie stars you’ll ever meet, always willing to talk with fans and remembering the name of a key grip decades after they’d worked together on a film. There are also stories of how irascible Hackman was on the set, how intractable with directors, how he was something of a prima donna. You get all of that in Norman Dale — Hackman’s recognition of the man’s complexity and his forgiveness of it, too, in other people and in himself.
He seemed to know that the truth of “human behavior,” as he called it, is that it’s never one thing, that there’s something mean and small in the kindest moments, and benevolence in the brutality, as uncomfortable and as honest as that sounds. He explored those contradictions for 50 years and in nearly 80 movies. And then he waved goodbye.
Commenti
Posta un commento